Node.js – A JavaScript Developer’s Dream

Here at Shockoe we are happiest when working with JavaScript. There are plenty of projects that call for other languages, like Objective-C, Java, or PHP, but the goal is to work with JavaScript whenever possible. For a decade I thought of JavaScript as this insecure toy language used to do miscellaneous effects on the web. I gave JavaScript another look when AJAX came into the vogue, but again dismissed it as a toy language with no real use. Then I started working at Shockoe, where I was very surprised to learn that JavaScript could be used for writing mobile applications.

Despite working for a company that primarily deals with mobile applications, I consider myself a web developer. I’ve been using PHP for a very long time and mostly just tolerated its inconsistencies and occasional strange syntax. PHP was just the way you did server side code for the web. Then I discovered Node.js. Now the goal is to write everything in JavaScript.

Node.js is advertised as being “for easily building fast, scalable network applications.” By default, Node.js performs very little I/O so blocking is not a concern. There’s an absurd amount of Node.js modules available from Node Package Manager (npm) that allow you to connect to almost anything imaginable. Most, if not all, modules for connecting to I/O provide async methods so that blocking remains of little to no concern.

To get started with Node, head on over to nodejs.org There are builds available for Windows, OSX, and Linux. Then head over to npmjs.com to see what modules Node Package Manager has to offer. There’s web frameworks, build harnesses, database drivers, and much more. Any developer who loves JavaScript owes it to themselves to explore the world of Node.js.

I’m at the point where I use Node.js for anything from giant web projects to minor fun tasks. At Shockoe we have taken an initiative to improve our health. One concern is that we spend all day looking at monitors which puts a lot of strain on our eyes. To combat this we have implemented a system known as the twenty twenty twenty rule. Every twenty minutes we take a twenty second break while looking at something twenty feet away. To alert everyone of the time we have a node server, running on our continuous integration machine in the corner, that turns a hue light purple for twenty seconds every twenty minutes. It’s enough to catch everyone’s attention without being extremely interrupting. This task could have been accomplished with cron, but I don’t want to schedule cron jobs. The goal is to write JavaScript.

In the upcoming weeks we at Shockoe will be expanding upon this post and, step by step, creating a project using Node.js.